Pornography

Product Information

In its place were cryptically opaque, bleached out and foggy soundscapes built on sparse instrumentation: Dempsey’s replacement Simon Gallup’s simple basslines, new member Matthieu Hartley’s unobtrusive synth drones, and robotic machine-like drumming from Tolhurst, topped with Smith’s distant, almost disembodied vocals and his economical off-kilter guitar.

Put simply, One Hundred Years is by far the most thrilling and terrifying opening act of any top 10 album from 1982. It’s probably still for me at least the strongest and most compulsively powerful opener on any Cure album period. There is nothing that comes even a third of the way close to its sheer rancorous claustrophobia, existential despair and sense of absolute ‘end of the world’ dread. Breakthrough top 40 hit A Forest (number 31 in March 1980) distilled all of the album’s strongest elements into one near-six minute slice of post-punk perfection. It’s still one of the greatest ’80s singles of all time. There will always be endless debates about which exactly is everybody’s favourite Cure record. My obsession with the Pornography album did not happen immediately as I was still largely unaware of their music save for the two hit singles that they had prior to this (A Forest and Primary). I was still far too engrossed in buying the records of Siouxsie and The Banshees and a few of the electronic synth pop bands of the time to really take much notice, despite the obvious fact that The Cure was one of their contemporaries. Some would say these three (Seventeen Seconds/Faith/Pornography) constitute the original, ‘definitive’, dark trilogy of early Cure, whilst there exists another school of thought, later perpetuated by Smith himself, which maintains that Pornography was – and still is, actually a key part of two trilogies (the later one being the ‘gloom trilogy’ that takes in this album along with 1989’s majestic and commercial high watermark Disintegration and also 2000’s consciously reflective and retrogressive Bloodflowers).God this is a great album. I bought it the first weekend it was released here in the uk, I was a huge alt. Indie fan at the time and a guitarist in a local indie band myself. I recall buying it but having some very strange looks from fellow bus passengers as I looked at the album cover on the way home. It must have been the word " Pornography" on the cover ?!?! Weird bus passengers ???? Me weird, oh no !! Secondly, the lyrics, a litany of unrelated snapshot horror imagery, line after line of seemingly unrelated scenarios of (social/political/metaphysical) discord and carnage. “Stroking your hair as the patriots are shot / Fighting for freedom on the television / Sharing the world with slaughtered pigs…” and then, apropos of nothing, the author then interjects “Have we got everything?…she struggles to get away…” Indeed, in 2003, The Cure performed all three albums in their entirely, in chronological sequence on a tour, which was later captured film and officially released as the DVD ‘Trilogy’. Ironically, for a band that prided itself initially on being defiantly anti image, the 1982 Pornography era was effectively the very first time the band actually had an identifiable image to speak of. Unsurprisingly, it soon became their trademark. Not for nothing did Cure fan and metal supremo Ross Robinson offer to produce one of The Cure’s later albums in 2004, in a conscious effort to get the band to record another similarly ‘angry and intense’ reprisal of his favourite album Pornography. However, the end result was a hugely uneven and disappointingly overwrought album which had none of the immediate devastating potency or claustrophobic intensity that Pornography served up, just somewhat inferior contrived attempts at familiar themes, which just goes to prove the old adage that any band can try and revisit or emulate their previous glories but seldom to the same degree of effectiveness.

Smith said that "the reference point" for Pornography was the Psychedelic Furs' self-titled debut album, which he noted "had, like, a density of sound, really powerful". [16] Smith also cited Siouxsie and the Banshees as "a massive influence on me [...] They were the group who led me towards doing Pornography. They drew something out of me". [17] In 1982, Smith also said that the "records he'd take into the bunker after the big bang", were Desertshore by Nico, Music for Films by Brian Eno, Axis: Bold as Love / Are You Experienced by Jimi Hendrix, Twenty Golden Greats by Frank Sinatra and The Early Piano Works by Erik Satie. [18] Release and reception [ edit ] Gill, Jaime (2 December 2004). "The Cure Seventeen Seconds, Faith, Pornography (Deluxe Editions) Review". BBC Music . Retrieved 28 October 2012. Thanks Robert !! We were called DNA from Wakefield and have a few releases listed even on here. But it's mainly down to The Cure and this album that affected my guitar playing and song writing style. In 2017, Damnation A.D. released a cover version of the entire album. Xiu Xiu and Chelsea Wolfe covered "One Hundred Years" on Xiu Xiu's 2021 album Oh No. Following the band's previous album, 1981's Faith, the non-album single " Charlotte Sometimes" was released. The single, in particular its nightmarish and hallucinatory B-side "Splintered in Her Head", would hint at what was to come in Pornography. [8]Roberts guitar sound here made me change my own guitar set up. I went out and bought a digital echo unit, placed upon the top of a mike stand, so I could easily manipulate the controls in real time during a live performance. I did not need to use any other effect pedals at all, just layers of tumbling echo.

Recording sessions were chaotically stop-start, with the band getting ever more immersed in the twin evils of drink and drugs (the most infamous outcome of this ongoing overindulgence was the giant mountain/pyramid of empty beer cans they had assembled in one corner of the studio). Part of me wants to dismiss it's wanton gloominess as alot of self consciously stylised gothic nonsense but at the end of the day I can't help liking it. The band, Smith in particular, wanted to make the album with a different producer than Mike Hedges, who had produced Seventeen Seconds and Faith. According to Lol Tolhurst, Smith and Tolhurst briefly met with the producer Conny Plank at Fiction's offices in the hopes of having him produce the album since they were both fans of his work with Kraftwerk, [11] however, the group soon settled on Phil Thornalley. [8] Pornography is the last Cure album to feature Tolhurst as the band's drummer (he then became the band's keyboardist), and also marked the first time he played keyboards on a Cure release. [8] The album was recorded at RAK Studios from January to April 1982. [12]

Release

a b Considine, J. D. (2 September 1982). " Pornography". Rolling Stone . Retrieved 13 October 2012. The Cure: Pornography" (Press release). Fiction Records . Retrieved 11 September 2013. From on-fiction.com

Of course, part of this stylistic overhaul could also be down to Smith originally having been clearly inspired by Siouxsie Sioux during their Juju era of 1981 as he has openly stated in many interviews how much ‘in awe’ he was of the sheer power of the Banshees’ sound around that time and thus harboured a desire to make a Cure record that took some of its sonic cues from that epochal Banshees recording and subsequent tour. Beaujon, Andrew (April 2005). "66.6 Greatest Moments in Goth". Spin. Vol.21, no.4. pp.70–73 . Retrieved 27 October 2012. On the album's recording sessions, Smith noted "there was a lot of drugs involved". [8] The band took LSD and drank a lot of alcohol, and to save money, they slept in the office of their record label. [9] The musicians usually turned up at eight, and left at midday looking "fairly deranged". Smith related: "We had an arrangement with the off-licence up the road, every night they would bring in supplies. We decided we weren't going to throw anything out. We built this mountain of empties in the corner, a gigantic pile of debris in the corner. It just grew and grew". [9] According to Tolhurst, "we wanted to make the ultimate, intense album. I can't remember exactly why, but we did". [8] The recording sessions commenced and concluded in three weeks. Smith noted, "At the time, I lost every friend I had, everyone, without exception, because I was incredibly obnoxious, appalling, self-centred". He also noted that with the album, he "channelled all the self-destructive elements of my personality into doing something". [8] Abebe, Nitsuh (12 May 2005). "The Cure: Seventeen Seconds / Faith / Pornography". Pitchfork . Retrieved 13 October 2012. Selected items are only available for delivery via the Royal Mail 48® service and other items are available for delivery using this service for a charge.

For Sale on Discogs

Retrospective views of Pornography have been far more favourable. [8] In his biography of the Cure, Never Enough: The Story of the Cure, Jeff Apter wrote that it "turned out to be the kind of album—just like Lou Reed's Berlin or Bowie's coke-fueled Low—that required some distance and a good few years of music history to be really appreciated". [8] In 1995, Mark Coleman of Rolling Stone noted that Pornography had come to be "revered by Cureheads as a masterstroke", while noting that "normal listeners will probably find it impenetrable". [8] Stewart Mason of AllMusic found it to be "much better than most mainstream critics of the time thought", but at the same time "not the masterpiece some fans have claimed it to be" and "just a bit too uneven to be considered a classic". [24] In 2004, Jaime Gill of BBC Music singled out the album's "sonic depth and sheer relentless conviction" for praise, adding that without these qualities, its "extraordinary misanthropy would be laughable". [34] Uncut called Pornography "a masterpiece of claustrophobic self-loathing." [35] Wolk, Douglas (October 2005). "The Cure: Pornography". Blender. No.41. Archived from the original on 23 November 2005 . Retrieved 2 November 2015. Well, to be truthful, in light of what transpired a few weeks later when he took the band out on their Fourteen Explicit Moments tour, he had taken the Cure as far as they could possibly go down that particular road. Because the band self-destructed shortly afterwards after a fight at a bar in Strasbourg when Smith and Simon Gallup came to blows, the pressure of maintaining the sheer intensity of the material by having to perform it and the rigours of touring anyway, having a detrimental effect on the mental health and wellbeing of the entire band and their crew.